Identity and Language Learning: Discourse, Culture, and Identity

The one on one relationship between language and cultural variability is definitely an oversimplification. I have experienced what is means to be separated by a deep cultural gap between speakers of the same language that Gumberz is talking about (Holliday, 75). When I moved from the northern part of my country, Chukotka, Russia, to Siberia, I immediately felt that I do not fit in as I came across a whole new culture with its values, traditions, beliefs, attitudes, and historical "baggage". Siberia is the centre of Buddhism in Russia, and growing up in a non-religious environment in the North, I found it hard to adjust to a new place where religion carries such a profound influence on people. Different ways of life based on the traditional economic centers ( for example, reindeer herding, fishing, sealing, extraction of a sea animal, and fur trapping in Chucotka and agricultural and commercial products such as wheat, potatoes, vegetables, sheep and cattle farming, timber, leather, graphite, and textiles in Buryatia)  and beliefs existing in these two different regions of Russia comprise
different types of discourses which enact and recognize defferent identities and activities. Even though the main language that is spoken in these two regions is Russian, Chukot, Eskimo, and Buryat langauages create unique local cultures and certainly serve as social languages in their areas.
So who am I? I tried to identify myself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social network . So far, I came up with such discourses: a half Buryat, a quarter Belorussian, a quarter Evenk, and a quarter Kamchadal, a Russian citizen, a middle-class emigrant of America, a graduate student, a Buddhist, a mother. Furthermore, my various social practices of the sociocultural groups to which I belong represent different cultural models that 'shape and organize large and important aspects of experience for particular groups of people as well as the sorts of conversations'.

I have experienced the so called culture shock even though I studied at the foreign language's department in my country and absorbing American and British cultures was what we, students, strived to do. However, when I started living here I realized that people that surrounded me did not understand me. I felt strange to myself because my 'historical' baggage, my cultural traditions and beliefs were just something cute but not applicable to any part of my life here. I felt like I lost my 'self', that nobody knows me the way I really am, and that I am playing some kind of a role I am forced to play. I missed speaking my language, celebrating holidays of my country, hearing the noise of the Russian songs from the streets, laughing with my friends, and most importanly, that same wavelength each country live  on. I still dearly miss my country but I have adjusted to my new life. I am enjoying the new experiences because learning always benefits our identities. Mutiplicity of identities inevitable and Westernization has captivated me for many years. It was something I strived to understand and expereince so badly that I am who I am now--an immigrant. I am in line  with the new set of conventions and social relationships sanctioned by the new community in which I find myself.